Kenya's Ordered Chaos

Regime Feeds Off Discord It Often Creates

December 26, 1997|By Hugh Dellios, Tribune Staff Writer.

LIKONI, Kenya — For five months, Ruth Adhiambo has been holed up in a tent in a church lot far from her shanty home, her fish-peddling business and the ballot box where she is supposed to vote in Kenya's presidential election this month.

The young mother grabbed her children and fled in August after gangs of marauding youths attacked the coastal slum where the family lived. The thugs threw a gasoline bomb into Adhiambo's tiny kiosk and cut her brother and a nephew with panga knives.

The home of her neighbor, Christine Kio, also was burned down, leaving Kio's 8-month-old son, Peter, with a blackened and deformed hand.

"The raiders were throwing leaflets every place, telling us we had seven days to give up our land," Adhiambo said. "We're afraid to go back. We fear because of the election."

In Kenya, nearly two decades into the reign of President Daniel arap Moi, the violence that killed dozens this year along the Indian Ocean coast passes for electoral reapportionment.

Human rights monitors, clerics and journalists say it was Moi's ruling party, the Kenya African National Union, that engineered the raids.

The party's goal, they say, was to sweep out "up country" tribe members like Adhiambo to assure the party of a voting majority along the coast; the specter of more violence hovers over the election, now set for Dec. 29.

Moi, an autocrat in the mold of other corrupt African despots, is favored to win his fifth five-year term. While post-Cold War currents have ousted the likes of Mobutu Sese Seko, an old ally in Zaire (now Congo), Moi again is seen to have outmaneuvered Kenya's badly divided political opposition, through means fair and foul.

A few months ago, as rioters shouted "Moi-butu must go!" in the streets of Nairobi, reform activists thought they finally had harnessed Kenyans' rage against their country's deterioration since Moi came to power in 1978. The shrewd Moi agreed to just enough reform to regain the advantage.

Lamenting what may be another lost opportunity, his opponents say their best chance is to force him into an election runoff against one of 14 presidential candidates who will split the opposition ballots in the first round of voting.

"This election is to buy Moi another lease on life," said Gibson Kamau Kuria, a human rights lawyer who spearheaded the reform drive this year. "For Kenya, Moi's reign is one long period of going downhill. Unless there are peaceful reforms, the poor will be going after Moi like dogs."

Kenyans say this year's violence resulted from the corruption, oppression and decay that afflict this country. Under Moi's predecessor, Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya was East Africa's showcase of modernization, prosperity and stability, and a place where foreign tourists felt at ease in the wildlife reserves and beach resorts.

For all its problems, Kenya is one of the continent's economic hubs and still outshines many of its neighbors. Even so, it has become one of the 25 poorest countries in the world, with citizens complaining that roads are decrepit, medicines are not available and they can't afford to send their children to school.

This month, the nation's 25,000 nurses went on strike, seeking more pay and benefits. Public hospital wards emptied, and mothers were giving birth to babies on street curbs, but the government barely responded.

Many blame Kenya's woes on its pervasive corruption, perhaps best exemplified by the Goldenberg scandal, in which government officials and businessmen allegedly colluded in 1993 to steal $400 million in public funds. Moi's son, Gideon, has been linked to the scandal.

This month, Moi announced a promotional campaign in France to attract tourists and business executives to the $70 million airport he built at his birthplace of Eldoret, a rural town 200 miles across Kenya's savanna from Nairobi, where few planes fly.

A tribal compromise gave Moi, 73, the presidency upon Kenyatta's death. As a member of the tiny Kalenjin ethnic group, Moi was seen as a small threat to leaders of Kenya's larger, mutually suspicious tribes. He proved surprisingly shrewd, exploiting ethnic rivalries and clamping down on political opponents to hold power for two decades.

His government has been repeatedly condemned by human rights organizations in recent years for arbitrary justice and mistreating opponents in prison.

"I am not a dictator," Moi has said repeatedly this year as the comparisons to Mobutu have rolled in.

In an independence day speech this month, Moi condemned election-related violence and warned voters to ignore "absurd" and "utterly false" claims by his opponents.

In 1992, as Kenya prepared for elections, Moi was under intense pressure from opposition leaders and international donors to abandon the country's one-party state and adopt democratic reforms. Many observers did not think he could survive such moves.